DE BS... YES OR NO...FEEDBACK TIME GO!

[HortaChickenist]

Okay Chicken Peeps,

If your like me and try chickening from an organic or sustainable approach you have probably come along Diatomaceous Earth and its suggestions for use in and around the coop for controlling various insect populations.
I pride myself on running a clean coop and just posted a thread dealing with a recent mite infestation I had to deal with...I had been using DE along with other organic sprays to control insects during my routine maintenance when a bout of heavy rains and flooding brought in the buggers (mites) to unprecedented levels and it became a small scale infestation.
I clean my nesting boxes weekly and had to go into super vigilant mode to get this under control, so when I tapped out my box liner onto a white paper...I found a good amount of mites happily running through the DE...well it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that obviously it's not working to well when the mites were playing hide and go seek in the stuff soooo long story short...I called BS on the DE and followed up with 3 weekly applications of Permethrin (twice) and in the middle IC3...so far so good...lots of chicken eggs and no mite eggs or signs of mites. I am keeping an eye out and doing preventative spraying anyways.
Funny thing was a good number of people responded as well, saying the exact same thing BS on DE...so just wanted to clear the air (supposedly its bad for the birds to breathe anyways) once and for all.. whathca think?

 

[JaeG]

I found exactly the same thing - thousands of mites happily living it up in a deep bed of DE. I won't be wasting my money on that stuff again. Very little is available for battling mites in my country and most are based on DE. I tried them all and nothing worked. I ended up painting the inside of my coop with neem oil. Elemental sulphur also known as Flowers of Sulphur is supposed to work too.

 

[Beer can]

Some people swear by it, both for mites and worming.
IMHO it's BS but I'm only going from what I've read on the opposing side, I've never used it myself or any chemicals either.
But if it works for you or them OK.
Guess I've just been lucky, no bugs, and all I've ever done is just deep litter method, clean the coop once a yr maybe. They dust bathe in the deep litter dust and I sometimes throw a pile of wood ash in for them to bathe also. Works for me many yrs now.

 

[lastco]

I use DE, but not for pest control. I use permethrin for the usual suspects. I've seen @JaeG mention neem oil before, and I'm very tempted to try it. I use it for other things, so I'd love to give it a shot.

I did discover one thing about DE that I like. I don't use it in my coops AT ALL and I never even attempted to use it to control pests. That being said, I will use it in my runs on occasion if we have several days of rain. It's absorbent. No, it will not completely dry an area, but it helps immensely with odor. I don't have drainage issues, so we're not talking about standing water or anything like that. Another problem, when everything is soggy, is flies. If I put DE out, the flies go elsewhere. I don't think for one second that it's killing them, there just isn't as much smell to attract them. I didn't expect this effect at all but I'm not complaining.

This is just my experience and I'm not promoting DE in the least. I was a bit hesitant to post this with all the DE hate going around. I get it though. I don't believe in using it like some "miracle of the earth" to solve every problem from mites to internal parasites, etc. People latch onto the idea of DE with extreme expectations. People then pass these expectations along to folks that should be spending their money on effective products. DE doesn't live up to the hype. That doesn't make it useless for more practical applications.

 

[Kiki]

DE is worthless. It does not kill mites and it will NOT kill worms inside of a chicken.

OP...Is it ok if I link other people's post here?

 

[JaeG]

A couple of articles by the chicken guru "The Chicken Chick" on this subject:
http://www.the-chicken-chick.com/2015/04/raising-chickens-naturally-diatomaceous.html
http://www.the-chicken-chick.com/2016/12/the-cut-dry-truth-about-diatomaceous.html

 

[HortaChickenist]

DE is worthless. It does not kill mites and it will NOT kill worms inside of a chicken.

OP...Is it ok if I link other people's post here?

Go for it...I just wanted to see if other people had a similar exp with DE as I did...we can help save a lot wasted time/money and help keep insect populations better controlled